Marriage counselling? Try throwing the china

Marriage and relationship counselling is blooming as never before, with a huge increase in couples seeking help with their relationships.

Accord, Ireland’s leading marriage counselling service, has gone from providing 9,500 therapy sessions in 1975 to over 30,000 last year.

Nice work if you can get it. Counselling modern couples is clearly an ever-expanding business. You too could be a dot.com millionaire if you managed to master the art and put it on line.

And why not? If it helps to go and talk to a professional about the way that couples bitch about each other -spouses criticising one another is the biggest issue - or you have fights about who does what around the house, by all means, go for it and get counselled.

It wouldn’t have suited me, or my old man. His therapy style is the stiff upper lip and the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius (very useful when life gets really mean, which it often does). I go for throwing china. Or even crystal glass, which shatters very satisfactorily on impact.

I nearly murdered him once with a crystal glass missile. Luckily, we had a calm Balkan au pair girl who said: “Oh yes, it is just like our gypsies in Transylvania. They fight like that. Sign of passionate nature. I bind up wounds, yes?” Yes, Borka, please, before I’m up for GBH.

Still, I recommend a good session of throwing china every now and again. Though better to aim at the wall, I suppose, than at the person.

Each to their own style. Some people clearly benefit from talking everything out with a professional. It’s just that I’m not personally disposed to think that talking about relationship problems solves them. I’d say it can also worsen them. It’s called “rubbing salt in the wound” (rather than binding it.) All kinds of buried resentments and repressed hostilities come out. And once you’ve said something really “honest” in a let-it-all-out spate, it can never again be unsaid.

Once you blurt out – “I always hated your mother anyhow” – or “I’ve never really fancied you sexually” – it will always, always be remembered in some part of the unconscious.

Those gnarled old peasant axioms which recommend caution and prudence are often the wiser. “Least said, soonest mended.” “Let sleeping dogs lie.” “Never let the sun go down on your anger.”

Bitch about your spouse? That’s what friends are for.

You can see I wouldn’t make much of a modern marriage counsellor. Because I can’t see that marriages are mended by these agony-aunt notions that you should be totally honest about everything in a relationship. I’d probably tell couples to focus less on their relationship and go out and get themselves a hobby. Model railways, say, or brass rubbings.

There is much to be valued in the ancient female wisdoms passed down the generations by mothers and grandmothers which include such cunning advice as: “Never tell a man everything”. “Always keep some private money that your husband doesn’t know about.” “Remember Nelson and, when judicious, turn the blind eye.”

And Numero Uno: never give a man bad news on an empty stomach. In fact, never give him anything on an empty stomach. Whatever you have to say to him, wait till he’s fed.

As for the strains in sharing household tasks and child-care – there is a clever evolutionary idea pertaining to this. It’s called “the division of labour”.

Back in the agricultural era, thousands of years ago, humankind made this useful discovery. Social and technical development could only occur if individuals specialised in their various tasks. If everyone just did multi-tasking, then everything just stayed at the same level of survival.

But if individuals specialised, then progress occurred. And specialisation required the division of labour.

That was why, in farm life, the men looked after the big animals and the fields, and the women looked after the hens and the house. Specialisation.

And people didn’t quarrel about who did what, because they had their allotted tasks.

Thus, nobody needs to quarrel about household tasks, in a marriage or a relationship, if the principle of specialisation is observed. I don’t say that the man has to do the tough, outside jobs and the woman has to do the more domestic, inside jobs: but if there are recognised spheres of interest, there will be peace in the home.

Divide up the labour and quit fighting over it. And above all, don’t nag.

But get yourself some cheap china that you can throw every now and again. I swear it relieves the stress just as effectively as counselling any day of the week.

Irish Independent Magazine. 4 March 2006